Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple was used to taking long steps to keep pace with Max’s six-foot-four stride. Nor was Matt an ambler. She may have worn high heels for business since college, but she’d never been a tiny-step totterer.

  In three minutes she and Rafi were settled at a picnic bench under the concrete sun shelter. He’d brought bags of oven-roasted vegetable chips and Amstel Light beer and spring water to go with Temple’s roast-beef sandwiches on rye. Tasty spread. Temple accepted a beer, and Rafi took the water.

  “Molina would have a bird if she could see us now,” Temple remarked after the first few bites of sandwich, “but not a duck.”

  “No, she’d have an ostrich,” Rafi agreed, upping the ante. “Whole.”

  “Never a flamingo,” Temple added, recalling the Las Vegas visit of concept artist Domingo with his thousands of pink plastic yard-birds.

  Enough preliminaries, she thought.

  “What’s this secret meeting about?” she asked Rafi. “I thought you and Molina had at least blunted the hatchet. You were a great go-to guy at the Oasis celebrity dance contest. Matt and I sure appreciated that; even ol’ C. R. seemed to.”

  “Yeah.” Rafi rotated the plastic water bottle between his palms.

  Temple was surprised. He seemed a tad nervous. Maybe he wasn’t used to talking about his feelings. Duh! An Arab-American grad of the L.A. police force from back in the days when ethnic borders were even edgier and bloodier on the streets than today. Guess not.

  She prided herself on being able to cross most social barriers since her Minneapolis TV-reporter days. That was a huge asset in her freelance PR business. She decided to let Rafi take his time, and soon he’d be spilling like the Exxon Valdez.

  “So,” he said suddenly, “how do I get the new, Dairy Queen–soft Molina to let me into my daughter’s life?”

  “Ask?” Temple suggested.

  He shook his head. “Too easy for her to give one of her knee-jerk responses. You know how wired she’s been lately. Apparently your ex did that to her?”

  Temple was startled by another mention of Max, no doubt.

  “Your ex-boyfriend,” Rafi said more specifically, “that magician guy. He may be gone, but, believe me, he’s not forgotten as far as Carmen Molina is concerned.”

  “Max wasn’t . . . forgettable. I thought you ran into him on some of those freelance security jobs.”

  Rafi shrugged. “Maybe. I ran into a lot of guys on those details. I’d have liked to shake his hand. He did a great number on Carmen and distracting her from her job, which she hates more than anything. Well, you oughta know. You two are always tenser than alley cats on the subject.”

  “We were not fighting over Max. You’ve got that wrong, just as Molina got Max wrong. She was being a pig-headed cop, sure someone was guilty before she had any more evidence than her instincts.”

  “Which are pretty sharp,” Rafi said.

  “You actually admire her? After the way she’s treated you?”

  “I give her credit, just as I give you credit.”

  “Well, you don’t give me credit for keeping my men. You’ve implied both Max and Matt might have a love-hate thing going with Lieutenant C. R., she of the untamed eyebrows.”

  “Untamed? Eyebrows?” Rafi laughed. “Women fight dirty, for sure. At least she doesn’t have the untamed love life you’ve had.”

  “Me? Untamed? I am so boring and below the radar.”

  “Yeah, sure, Zoe Chloe.” Rafi laughed again. “Look, that’s why I’m courting your good opinion.”

  The word courting made Temple seriously leery. “Yeah?”

  “You know Molina way better than I do.”

  “I do?”

  “Right. As a woman. I want to take Mariah to that father-daughter dance when she starts junior high in the fall. How can I ace out your handsome, morally superior fiancé for the job?”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  “My line to you, bounced back at me. I’m serious, Miss Zoe Chloe Ozone Temple. If I let another man be there for Mariah because her thirteen-year-old brain thinks he’s ‘cool,’ I’ve got no chance at ever getting into her life. Unless you think I have no right to be a father to anyone because Molina had such a huge lack of faith in me fifteen years ago in L.A.”

  “Why did that happen?”

  “We were rivals on the force. Minorities and women were put into that position then.”

  “It was a work problem?”

  “Basically. Then she . . . got pregnant.”

  “Not by herself. But a surprise.”

  “A shock to the solar system, only she didn’t tell me, just held it in and ran. Reminds me of your MIA boyfriend.”

  Temple wanted to get her back up, then realized Rafi was right. “Max only left Vegas that first time because some international bad guys were after him. He thought staying with me put me in the line of fire, and he was right. A couple of them trapped me in a parking ramp, wanting to intimidate Max’s whereabouts out of me.”

  “From your body language just now, the creeps’ pressure got physical.”

  “That shows? I’d almost forgotten about that nasty incident.”

  “No, you haven’t. Your lips and eyelids tightened. Not much. Enough for a trained observer to notice. I’d say you’re lucky they only came calling once. So Kinsella was right to rabbit for the faraway hills. Where’d he go?”

  “Canada.”

  Rafi whistled. “Not easy to pull off on the run. Borders and visas and such.”

  “Max knew how to vanish. There’s got to be a good reason for a pregnant Molina to run.”

  “Like what?”

  “You wanted her to have an abortion.”

  “Since I didn’t know she was pregnant until I saw Mariah some dozen years later, when did I have a chance to dictate what she should do?”

  “She knew you would.”

  “She was wrong. And so are you. She ran because she thought I wanted her to have a baby, tricked her into it.”

  “That’s just . . . crazy. From all I’ve heard, most guys are edgy about fatherhood at first. Especially unmarried, living-together guys.”

  “Yeah. That’s the usual drill. It’s a stupid story we both should disown. Her birth control failed. She thought I sabotaged it to make her into a stay-at-home mommy so she couldn’t ace me out for promotions at work. She was a twofer. Ethnic and a woman. Management liked to handle ‘diversity’ by two at one blow. As for the pregnancy, I wasn’t ready to go anywhere bold on the relationship front. If I couldn’t hack a baby, we could have split. Simple.”

  “She just took off without notice?” Temple said.

  “Yeah. I admit it put me on an auto–self-destruct. She was good. There was no trace. She pulled a total vanishing act. She’d have made a great spy. You don’t know how utterly ineffective I felt. Me, a cop.”

  “She did split, and it isn’t simple. What’s important is that you want a relationship with your half-grown daughter now.”

  “Who knew I’d have father tendencies?” Rafi’s wry grin grew crooked. “She sure didn’t.”

  “I can see,” Temple admitted carefully, “why her disappearing with no word would put you in a years-long tailspin.”

  “That ‘maybe dead, maybe not’ question is a bitch, isn’t it?” he responded. “Even if you’ve got someone waiting in the wings this time.”

  “You don’t,” Temple said, stung.

  “That’s just a fact. I’m not blaming you.”

  “Why didn’t you move on and find someone?”

  “Let her disappearing throw me into a down cycle? I was a cop. I should have been able to find my girlfriend. It was a double whammy to my self-esteem.”

  “What changed you?”

  “Maybe Zoe Chloe Ozone.”

  “What? She’s an annoying twerp.”

  “I discovered a couple things doing security at that Teen Idol reality-TV house. I liked solving puzzles and I liked watching over annoying twerps who were smart and fei
sty. I may be wrong, but Mariah really grew up at that thing, didn’t she?”

  Temple munched chips and sipped beer. “Yes, she did. And so did you.”

  “Then Mama showed up for the big show with her down-and-dirty undercover cop.”

  Oooh. Now Temple was doing the observing. Rafi Nadir did not like Dirty Larry Podesta at all. And it was over Molina.

  Temple was sure she should be blushing here. She didn’t want to think of Molina and Rafi Nadir in bed. She didn’t want to think of Molina in bed with a man at all, period, especially that edgy Dirty Larry. You don’t get a nickname like that for nothing. Molina should know better. She was the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD, right?

  Rafi glanced at Temple. “I’ve got to follow up on the rapport Mariah and I built at the murder house and now at the dancing competition. That’s why I’m asking you to figure a way around Molina. You actually do know what that feels like, to be run out on.”

  “How am I going to influence Molina? She wouldn’t believe me about Max . . . not until recently. Why has she turned around on that?”

  “Being so quick to judge has cost her. Again. Nah, she doesn’t regret leaving me. ‘Loser,’ she probably figured. All she ever regrets is being wrong. Maybe about Max Kinsella. Maybe even about me. And Mariah. Which is a big step for her. She might even believe I’m human enough to really care about my daughter.”

  “Of course you are,” Temple said. “It shows. On your daughter and on you.”

  “Yeah? You don’t think I’m the pond scum from L.A.?”

  “Maybe at first, but not anymore. You get Mariah better than Molina does right now. I think it’s this awkward mother-daughter stage. And something is rubbing Molina raw lately.”

  Temple didn’t add that maybe the something could be someone: Max still, or even Matt. It wasn’t human for Molina to be around, or at least know, two such, well, eligible men and feel nothing. But then, Molina hadn’t been letting herself feel human for a lot a years, according to Rafi.

  “Why,” she asked, “don’t you just ask Molina for visitation time? You’ve got a steady job now.”

  “She’d bite my head off if I asked her the time right now. Carmen is off balance somehow. I don’t know if it’s a guy or her job or hormones.”

  “Hormones? She’s not that old!” Temple said, before she could stop herself from defending her bête noire.

  “You’ve never had a kid. It can do things to your system.”

  Temple doubted motherhood was that altering, but finding out he was a father certainly seemed to have straightened up Rafi.

  “How’d you get that assistant-security-chief position at the Oasis, anyway? That was an impressive step up from temp jobs.”

  Rafi shrugged the question off, like dislodging an itch between his shoulder blades. “Still knew some guys who could give me a decent recommendation. Guess it was more a question of why than how.”

  Temple waited. People talked more that way.

  “What pushed me to move on, and up, as it turned out, was that last temp job. Guy, uh, got killed on my watch.”

  “Yeah? Some nut with a gun? You had to shoot him?”

  “Nah. This guy shot himself, in a way. It was the guy in the sky at the Neon Nightmare. Bungee-cord act over the dance floor. He shot down from the peak of the pyramid, and instead of bouncing back up, slammed into the wall right in front of me.”

  Temple’s pulse roughened. “I didn’t know you worked there. It’s a crazy maze of loud music and light, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah, those damn strobe lights and neon flashes made it insane to see,” Rafi said. “And the bosses were freaky and almost invisible. You’d glimpse them coming and going, seeming to slink into those funky black Plexi walls. I did my job interview in a room I never found my way back to again, with a guy in white tie and a woman in a turban.”

  “Weird. How could you be an adequate security guard in that environment?”

  “I couldn’t, when it came down to something really serious,” Rafi said, his features settling into a bitter mask of self-disgust. “After that bungee cord failed and the magician guy fell, I couldn’t find a pulse, couldn’t even see what was injured. It was so chaotic. I tried CPR, called an ambulance. The EMTs were right there and whisked him away. They probably kept trying to resuscitate him, but, uh, it was a lost cause, I bet.”

  “Didn’t you check to find out?”

  “Where? Hospitals don’t provide information like that. Newspapers didn’t run a word on the incident. Anyway, he wasn’t about to come back anytime soon, or ever, even if he survived that body blow.

  “That was a life lesson for me. I saw we were all hanging by a thread, that I needed to hustle and get hold of a better one if I wanted a chance to get to know my kid more before my bungee cord ran out of rebound too.”

  Temple nodded, but her composure was shaken.

  Was Max’s death Rafi’s life lesson?

  Synthesized

  Temple drove back from Sunset Park undistracted by what she could see of the coinciding sunset in the surrounding mountains. Nature couldn’t soothe a mind and emotions whirling tornado style.

  Max must have been seriously investigating the Synth at the Neon Nightmare and had never whispered a word about it to her. After he’d returned from vanishing on her a couple of years ago, he’d promised to keep her in the loop about any threats on his life.

  He’d always protected her more than she liked. No more protecting her from his counterterrorism past, he’d promised. They’d figured out what the Synth was—even that there was a Synth—together. Together, they’d mourned the death of University of Las Vegas professor Jefferson Mangel, an academic with a puckish enthusiasm for “magic” and a sense of the mystical in life.

  Professor Mangel had been found dead in his classroom-cum-magic museum, inside a drawing of the constellation Ophiuchus, the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, forgotten and dropped centuries earlier.

  The ancients named it for the image they saw in those stars, a man struggling with a giant, entwining serpent. That image was not so different from another ancient one for eternity, a circling snake swallowing its own tail. That was called the Worm Ouroboros, in the sense that medieval dragons were often called worms.

  Temple was starting to think the constellation’s human figure might be female. Jeff Mangel was not the only victim of an unnamed killer cluttering Las Vegas in the sign of the Synth. Wasn’t she herself entangled in struggling right now to put Cosimo Sparks’s death together with Jeff’s, not to mention the parking-lot murder of the retired assistant of Max’s magical mentor, Gandolph the Great, aka Garry Randolph, and the spectacular death of Randolph himself (undercover in female garb, no less, to unmask fake mediums) at last Halloween’s séance to raise Harry Houdini? So the victims with magical links were Gandolph first, then Jeff Mangel, then Gandolph’s assistant, Gloria Fuentes, and now Cosimo Sparks.

  Oh! The personalities, the deaths, the timing, the circumstances, the sign of the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus found at the professor’s classroom death scene, scrawled in chalk, and at Cosimo Sparks’s. They were all tangled up in her head . . . three magic-related men dead and one’s retired assistant. All unsolved murders. Now this Phantom Mage at the Neon Nightmare could be another victim. And Max, another retired magician, was missing. Again.

  Rafi’s comments increased her fears that Max had been trailing the rumored secret society in disguise at the Neon Nightmare. The Synth’s calling card was definitely the image of the major stars that formed Ophiuchus. Where the ancients saw tangled human and serpent flesh, Temple had seen the childish sketch of a house, askew, and now holding the splayed stick figures of two dead men, the professor and the Synth magician.

  She couldn’t let the implications of what Rafi had inadvertently revealed lie there like a dead black mamba. Somebody had to stir up things in the Neon Nightmare snake pit.

  As soon as she got home, Temple checked for Louie—apparently out or snoozing somewhere. />
  Her desk drawer burped up the handy, dandy table of unsolved murders and purported suspects she’d made and updated to keep victims and possible perps straight, even if one suspect was Max. A quick study of the table showed magic was the undying, unifying theme. She now, thanks to Rafi, had a new highly suspect site to investigate.

  Temple then attacked her bedroom closet, grabbing a ruffled Reagan-eighties fuchsia taffeta fitted jacket, slim, short Vera Wang skirt suitable for nightclubbing, and her new Giuseppe Zanotti leopard-print suede wedges perfect for the urban jungle.

  Temple hotfooted into her spare bedroom-office to raid that closet for a purple suede envelope-style clutch bag with a slim metal shoulder strap. It was flat enough for evening but perfect to hold the Colt Pocket Lite Max had insisted she’d learned to shoot.

  The gun was in a closet shoe box (such a TV-show cliché) next to a small, surprisingly heavy box of bullets. The weapon was loaded and the safety was on: no resident kids to worry about, and Louie didn’t have an opposable thumb. Finding a firearm that fit her hand, and a trigger she had the finger strength to pull had taken many tries. A tiny twenty-two didn’t always fill the bill just because it looked feminine sized. Max had drilled her on proper firearm handling, but her palms still dampened as she lifted the Colt from its sheepskin-lined triangular leather case and put it inside her leather-lined purse. She wasn’t used to carrying either one: an ordinary-sized purse or a gun.

  The shooting range was months behind her, but if Max had been the Phantom Mage and had disappeared from the Neon Nightmare, as Rafi’s on-scene testimony indicated, she wasn’t going there without backup.

  Poor Rafi. Witnessing that fall had made him “give up” on private security jobs and indirectly led him into a decent career. Poor Max, if it had been Max. She wouldn’t leave the Neon Nightmare tonight without finding that out.

  The weight of the small revolver felt reassuring at her hip, where the purse rested. She could keep a hand on the top, as women do in crowds, and be ready for anything. What if Max had never left Las Vegas? What if he was being held prisoner at the Neon Nightmare? Rafi had mentioned the “bosses” coming and going, the place’s interior being a black Plexiglas maze, where reflective surfaces and neon almost blinded most eyes.